California needs real math education, not gimmicks

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/california-needs-real-math-education

by jseliger • 3 years ago

297 362 3 years ago

noahpinion.blog

iwsk• 3 years ago

This is incredibly sad. What does Dr. Boaler have to gain from crippling math education?

tylerhou• 3 years ago

Money from consulting fees. https://twitter.com/minilek/status/1509678967472549889

wiseleo• 3 years ago

Data Science is a form of statistics. Algebra II is a pre-requisite for statistics. How is replacing a pre-requisite with a more advanced class is a good idea?

kevinpet• 3 years ago

Simple, you teach a very low level spreadsheets course but label is "Data Science". Voila!

jordigh• 3 years ago

How is data science not just statistics, rebranded?

When I studied statistics in university we studied clustering, regression, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, visualisations, charting, general linear models... how is this different from data science?

Is it just because we have more computing power, so we rebranded it? Instead of doing frequentist analyses because those are easy to do with smaller computers, now we do more Bayesian stats, on bigger computers, and therefore call it data science?

topkai22• 3 years ago

From the one data science course I took: compared to a traditional stats class, there is a bit more focus on data acquisition and pre processing, and more usage of our of the box tools, a bit less on some of theory (I don’t recall hearing about type I and type II errors).

Of course, since it was a professional course there is probably the assumption that students already know these things…

slt20213• 3 years ago

statistics assumes you have data prepared and ready to work on.

data science is more practical in a sense, you learn more to prepare real-life data for analysis.

also statistics coursework doesn't cover ML part (at least the stats course that I took)

tnecniv• 3 years ago

I’ve periodically looked into it the differences and mostly it seems to come down to priorities. Statistics prioritizes mathematical rigor all the way through the process from collection to analysis. ML / Data science has more algorithmic concerns. Even the theoretical aspects of the two fields emphasize that distinction.

fatherzine• 3 years ago

"data science" -- science warping onto itself, forgetting that it's primary mission is to match data with reality.

oefrha2• 3 years ago

It’s “data science” only in name. (Btw I hate the term data science; most practitioners of this profession practice pseudoscientific bullshit or worse.) From TFA:

The core issue of the CMF’s “data science” section is that it claims to be discussing data science while it is actually discussing data literacy.
...
The CMF is replete with statements like “high-school data-science class students can learn to clean data sets – removing any data that is incorrect, corrupted, incorrectly formatted, duplicated, or incorrect in some other way [...] High school students can also learn to download and upload data, and develop the more sophisticated “data moves” that are important to learn if students are tackling real data sets.''

It’s more of an Excel class with some basic math sprinkled in.

avs733• 3 years ago

As someone with a PhD in education, anytime someone uses the phrase “real education” as an attack on new approaches to teaching and learning, it’s a gigantic red flag that their argument is unserious.

ecshafer4• 3 years ago

The "advice" coming from these professors of education to state governments should be what is giving you a giant red flag. Reducing quality of education by lowering standards, and lying about the data, shows that it is not driven by science.

My opinion on this: the "education" establishment in the US is driven by people looking for consulting fees, as shown by someone in this post linking to Dr Boaler's absurd consulting fees.

Math standards are being dropped in the US, and the fight is coming from your colleagues. Reading is taught incorrectly and has been for decades as shown by dropping phonics based education and using "whole word association". Chinese mathematics education is several years ahead of American education, and the professors and educators are debating on if they should make American students unable to take Algebra in middle school, despite numerous countries learning algebra years before that.

HWR_142• 3 years ago

Aren't those absurd consulting fees determined by taking a small fee and dividing it by a very small number of nominal hours worked?

morpheuskafka3• 3 years ago

Chinese mathematics education is several years ahead

My Chinese gf learned how to analyze simple electric circuits (Ohm's law, reading schematics, etc.) in middle school and was tested on it for high school entrance, even though she was an arts/humanities student. The standards here in NC for middle school science seem to only require knowing that circuits must be closed and insulators/conductors. That would be an (elective) HS or AP physics class. Also, there seems to be one set of standards and one test for all students in middle school and pre-university students. Instead of "detracking" by going down to the lowest common denominator, there are high expectations for all students.

In the UK and many other countries, what we call "advanced" AP Calculus BC is just "A-Level Math" and is the expected minimum for studying STEM fields in university. In America you can get into university (even a prestigious one) and start off at "College Algebra." People from other countries are shocked that law, medicine, etc. are graduate degrees requiring a different-field undergrad, because of how little a high school diploma actually means in America.

There is a massive state of under-education in America, and shockingly, it's become more and more popular to call education and degrees worthless. There's a lot to criticize about the out-of-pocket costs of college, but the education itself is invaluable. And weakening high school degrees even further is the last thing we need.

kyboren• 3 years ago

As someone with a brain, anytime someone uses an appeal to authority as a blithe dismissal of a substantial article, it's a gigantic red flag that their argument is unserious.

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Ultimately, K-12 education in the US is generally not great. This probably means any expert in the field is not a good educator.

sidlls2• 3 years ago

I've been absolutely enraged at the approach to mathematics instruction my children (who have just finished 2nd and 5th grade) have had to-date. It is an absolutely mind-bogglingly inflexible system that seems designed to frustrate anyone gifted enough genetically or fortunate enough environmentally (e.g. parental/mentor instruction) to be beyond the concepts taught at a given level.

AvocadoPanic• 3 years ago

Did yours read any assigned novels in school in the 4th grade? Ours didn't, they don't do that anymore.

Not much writing either, because so much is online.

My wife is homeschooling next year.

charlieyu1• 3 years ago

As a former teacher, there have always been pressure to push “new” approaches towards teachers and students. These approaches usually failed completely as predicted. The cycle repeats every 10-20 years.

kaitai2• 3 years ago

You can't get a promotion in the bureaucracy if you just "do things well". You must "innovate" and start an "initiative". Administrators also get a pay bump for completing degrees like a master's and a PhD, right? so you have to do something that pleases the advisory committee to get your pay bump. Individual incentives are really misaligned with helping kids learn math best.

bpodgursky• 3 years ago

I don't want to be rude about this, but education PhDs are a complete joke, and your argument would be stronger without mentioning as much.

gnicholas2• 3 years ago

It took me a while to realize that most people with "doctoral degrees in education" have EdDs, not PhDs. The people I know with the latter are quite bright; the people with the former are not necessarily.

One of the reasons for this is that schools typically pay teachers more if they have a masters or doctoral degree in education (but it doesn't matter what type of doctoral degree...so people flock to the less rigorous one).

lern_too_spel5• 3 years ago

I haven't seen anything serious in the field of education. Education can and should be a science. There should be experiments to determine what works and what doesn't work. Instead, we have 5 different preschool pedagogies, 5 different elementary pedagogies, and 5 different secondary pedagogies, and nobody bothering to figure out what works at scale.

davidgay4• 3 years ago

There should be experiments to determine what works and what doesn't work.

I think one of the problems is that a proper experiment takes ~ 12 years (or more, if your want, eg, impact in college or on writing life) which leads to many problems:

- how do you get the research funded?

- how do you get people to stick to your approach for that long?

- how do you justify the risk that your idea will not make things worse (for a whole 12 years...)?

tgv4• 3 years ago

You're right-ish, but... the problems of educational sciences are plenty, but most importantly the impossibility to run proper experiments, and the almost complete lack of fundamental, reliable knowledge about human cognition and learning. The bottom line is that they have no idea how learning works, nor how teaching works. Their findings should not be used as evidence. Only the largest effects could be cautiously used as guidelines for gradual and reversible change.

aeonik2• 3 years ago

The Author may have good points, but there is still a lot of value in teaching basic statistics, and I don't understand why Algebra is required to understand basic stats.

Even just learning the basic descriptive statistics and getting people fluent in reading charts can be very valuable. The fact that they may not understand the deeper nuances is fine in my opinion.

Also... I work with a lot of data analysts and data scientists, and I really question if 90%+ of them have even a faintest understanding of their calculus course material. Most took the courses, promptly forgot everything, and just learned what they needed for their job, or use tools built by people who actually know the details.

extr2• 3 years ago

why Algebra is required to understand basic stats

I don't understand how you can say this. Literally every statistical concept is defined via formula, and to manipulate formulas correctly (or even really understand the concept) you need basic algebra.

Going even further than that, if you have the most basic "business scenario word problem", like cells in excel that describe how many widgets are made per hour, how many are defective, the price of each one...etc. The skill that lets you combine them in a sensical way to figure out your profit or loss is literally algebra. It's used by everyone everywhere all the time. Algebra is a core skill we can't be skipping.

IMO if you don't teach stats, people are okay, they have an intuition about fractions and can reason from there. But not teaching basic algebra and putting them in the modern economy is like not teaching someone to read and putting them in a car on the road.

aeonik2• 3 years ago

I struggled a lot with Algebra, I forged my teacher's signature to not retake it for the third year in a row.

I didn't really "get" it until I started programming and learning stats. That's when it all hit me, then I went back and had to relearn what the hell they were talking about during my middle school years.

Also, once I got to Highschool math, Algebra 2 and PreCalc, it was very easy to simply memorize formulas and plug and chug.

You don't need to know Algebra to know what profit and loss is. If you want to calculate a break-even point, you look up the break-even point formula and plug in the numbers, or more commonly today, find the menu in your analysis program. None of my business classmates had any idea how to manipulate the formulas. You get a "quant" to do that for you. Yes, there are bad consequences because of this, but this is the reality of most modern businesses. People are already skipping Algebra, we just kinda let people move forward anyway.

To test it, give a highschool Algebra test randomly sampled modern workers. Don't let them study for it, pop quiz. I believe almost everyone would fail horribly if you could control for cheating.

Same story for trig, I didn't really appreciate or "get it" until I got really interested in ballistics and digital signal processing many years later.

Kids like me find Algebra, by itself, too far removed and too abstract to even begin to find value in it. I really had no idea what we were talking about most of the time. Sure you can learn some patterns and "trust" that the teachers know best, but then I go home and ask my parents, one who has a Doctoral degree in medicine, and the other a Master's in finance, when the last time they calculated an integral, or used the quadratic formula, and they say freshman year of college 40 years ago... A lot of my teachers were also full of shit and power tripping a significant amount of the time, so that didn't help build any trust either.

Thankfully, I figured out the deep beauty and power of math, but I have quite a lot of catching up to do, but my mental framework now is far more organized at mapping how all the concepts relate, and why they're valuable. I can learn more now in a few months than years of study when I was in Highschool. All because I can plug the concepts into a nice modular framework, and I can experiment with ideas in code.

Almost nobody that I knew did the same though, most of my coworkers over my 15 year career don't have the patience or curiosity to dive into this stuff. It's actually really hard to find friends who geek out about math and functional programming (expect for a few corners of the Internet, including here).

Hopefully that clarifies things, if not, I'd need to know more about your confusion.

greesil• 3 years ago

Probability density functions, or probability mass functions, are functions. Guess where you learn what those are?

Programming. We should be teaching programming and it should be mandatory at the earliest possible opportunity. And if my teenager isn't doing dynamic programming as a freshman in highschool I will be sorely disappointed.

J/k. Or am I.

I learned about functions in algebra. Seems like that concept would come in handy for stats.

tayo42• 3 years ago

the way calculus is taught is so far removed from any application. i had no idea what was going on. area under curved and x approaches infinity is all i remember.

JohnMakin• 3 years ago

algebra until highschool? some students can take it as early as 5th/6th grade. ludicrous.

jncfhnb4• 3 years ago

Depends on definitions mostly. You’ll likely start doing things like simple linear equations, including algebraic notation before formally doing “algebra 1”

ip263• 3 years ago

Resounding agreement. I know kindergartners who can solve “z = x + y, solve for x” forms of problems, but some people call that “algebra”.

bushbaba3• 3 years ago

California k-12 public education has become a joke. Even the top rated schools are succeeding from students going to after school tutoring and not from the education in the public institution.

It’s appalling how California cares more about homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare over education. Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class to wealthy.

I can only hope that in 5-10 years a new set of voters shift focus to education being a top priority.

mimikatz• 3 years ago

More and more I get the feeling California doesn't care about the homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare. There are just a ton of grifters who make a lot of noise on the topics, but don't push for policies that would actually improve things. Or push for them in a way that is just more red tape that hinders actual results. Education is in the same bucket. Lots of noise from lots of people with bad ideas or bad implementations of ok ideas.

anonporridge• 3 years ago

The homelessness industrial complex is quite profitable.

riku_iki2• 3 years ago

they likely dedicate good amount of money, but overall corrupted and inefficient system doesn't allow to put these money at work.

Hydraulix989• 3 years ago

The bar for US public school education is abysmally low to begin with. One would have expected Silicon Valley to be better than that, not one of the worst in the country.

Source: Someone from the Midwest who went to a public school

HWR_142• 3 years ago

Education is the single biggest factor to driving social mobility of the poor to middle class, and middle class to wealthy

Is it? Any evidence that supports the idea that the quality of K-12 education matters at all?

jschveibinz• 3 years ago

Good question, and it probably depends on what you read. Here is one report that suggests there is a correlation, but I would continue to gather data:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/thirteen-economic-facts-a...

pessimizer• 3 years ago

We seem to expect it to fix poverty. We should fix poverty, and use public education to fix dumb kids.

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

What gives you the impression that California prioritizes homelessness, immigrants, and medicare over education? The state spent $136 billion on k-12 education last year, making it far and away the largest spending program. Anti-homelessness programs typically get 1% that much, although recent years have been slightly more as the housing crisis worsens.

riku_iki2• 3 years ago

The state spent $136 billion on k-12 education

is it state or local taxes?..

bushbaba3• 3 years ago

California ranks no where near the top on dollars spent per student. Rankings are worse when you account for each states cost of living.

https://www.learner.com/blog/states-that-spend-the-most-on-e...

superchroma2• 3 years ago

I'm not sure any part of america has working education; across the board it seems to be a huge money sink that produces poor results. Gesturing to homelessness, immigrants and healthcare is clouding the issue. Those are real, pressing issues too, and it's not a binary choice of tackling one or the other.

david38• 3 years ago

This is false. My children went to top rated public school and my older daughter is about the graduate a year early from Berkeley in math.

electriclove4• 3 years ago

Is their success due to their public school or due to their parent(s)?

Solvency2• 3 years ago

"It’s appalling how California cares more about homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and Medicare over education."

Can you explain what those subjects have to do with education and how one affects the other?

bushbaba3• 3 years ago

Tldr k-12 education budget is smaller than what taxpayers are paying for homelessness, undocumented immigrants, and expanded Medi-Cal. Cutting costs in these areas could significantly bolster our K-12 budget.

Homelessness programs take up significant budget. 636 million per year SF spends on homelessness, SFUSD’s budget is 1.28 billion. Cutting the homeless budget would allow for increased education spend.

Undocumented immigrants make up ~10% the state population and are in the lowest tax paying bucket. On average just 1304$/undocumented immigrant of yearly tax revenue. So they are taking more social services than what they bring in. If California was more active in deporting them or enforcing tax collection practices, we’d have greater educational dollars per legal resident.

Medi-Cal has 1/3rd the states population enrolled. This is significantly higher than many other states. This program takes up significant tax dollars. These tax dollars could instead be spent on public education.

pas• 3 years ago

Social issues and education are not separate. That's the problem. Most of the low-performing kids are from - you might not guess it - households that are in need of social support.

Yes, there are some issues that can be demarcated as not intertwined with education.

But of course homeless people can have kids, and now they are in the foster system, and that's likely worse than fixing the homelessness. And similarly, when poor kids or their parents have medical issues, which they almost surely will have, because they don't have the resources to have a healthy lifestyle, where do you think they will go? If they have to go to work to afford medication they won't continue their studies, or simply won't even apply for higher ed.

The problem that voters should address is high costs, lack of efficiency, run of the mill corruption and so on. (But for this voters would need to accept actual cities with functioning transit system, not endless suburbs and highways around a few corporate skyscrapers. They'd need to face the actual problem of resource deficit that's needed to actually make some progress in closing the education and income gap of the disadvantaged, and so on.)

fwungy• 3 years ago

It's all so tiresome.

gloryjulio• 3 years ago

It really just looks like another form of the Reagan economics of 'starve the beast' in the end.

Kill the public education. Enrich the privatized education. How ironic

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

I feel like the facts are a little thin. It is not really true that "For decades, American math curriculum has followed a standard sequence: arithmetic, algebra, geometry, algebra II, precalculus and trigonometry, and calculus." That may have been the local condition in some places. The high school in my city does not have and has never had any named math course except calculus and statistics. Everything else is just "math". Common core math does not follow the given progression, either. 8th grade common core math has elements of algebra, geometry, and statistics and probability.

zdragnar• 3 years ago

My school system had a similar progression, though trig was on its own and you either took basic calc (essentially just limits and differentials) or AP calc, or a statistics-lite course that was basically "business math" for kids who weren't on a college track but might try for an associates degree or maybe community college. Though, arithmetic and algebra 1 were just called "math" (all pre-common-core, of course).

This was at a somewhat rural school in the Midwest, for what it is worth.

jncfhnb4• 3 years ago

For me, New England, early 10s the algebra 1, geometry, algebra 2, precalc, calc was the exact pattern.

Edit: despite the name, pre calc was basically entirely trigonometry.

lambdasquirrel• 3 years ago

Same in NY.

evanmoran• 3 years ago

Same in PA. I was a math major before switching to CS and this course order has defined mathematics in the US for 3 decades.

smabie• 3 years ago

Pretty much everyone I know has gone thru this exact sequence of math courses, including myself.

thesuperbigfrog• 3 years ago

In the Texas in the 90s the math courses were: algebra, geometry, algebra II, precalculus and trigonometry, and calculus.

trentnix• 3 years ago

I can confirm. We had all of that at the small, rural Texas school I attended. My class of 17 produced two successful computer scientists, a college professor, and a Navy nuclear engineer, each of whom all went through that very curriculum.

Solvency2• 3 years ago

Learning trigonometry so late makes zero sense. It should go geometry, trigonometry, then algebra, and so on.

christophilus• 3 years ago

Same in SC.

SoftTalker4• 3 years ago

My math curriculum in the 1970s/80s followed exactly that progression.

ericbarrett• 3 years ago

Same in the 90s in San Jose.

rockemsockem• 3 years ago

That sequence was exactly what I had in northern Virginia in the early 2000s. If you think back, did your "math" teach approximately that same sequence?

threatofrain• 3 years ago

The CA and NY Common Core does follow that sequence even if the names don't match up exactly, and even if there's a sprinkling of geometry, statistics, or algebra mixed together in early math.

goolulusaurs• 3 years ago

In my younger years, particularly during my schooling, I held a deep resentment towards the educational system. It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth. However, my perspective has evolved over time. I've come to understand that the issues I observed are not unique to the school system but rather characteristic of large institutions as a whole.

The pervasive failure of these institutions to meet their stated objectives isn't an isolated phenomenon. It's symptomatic of a larger, systemic problem – the widespread presence of perverse and misaligned incentives at all levels within large organizations.

Unless we find a way to counteract this, attempts at reform will merely catalyze further expansion and complexity. The uncomfortable truth is, once an organization surpasses a certain size, it seems to take on a 'life of its own', gradually sacrificing its original mission to prioritize self-preservation and expansion. Who has ever seen an organization like this voluntarily reform itself? I certainly haven't.

MikeTheRocker• 3 years ago

Quality comments like this are what keep me coming back to HN.

I certainly agree. I’m not sure exactly how, but it’s clear there needs to be some sort of incentive for institutions to actually achieve their purpose, but as soon as a metric is measured, it gets exploited and over optimized.

c_crank4• 3 years ago

The only incentive that works is letting such institutions crash and burn and be replaced. Even giant monopolies can end up losing money and going under.

smilekzs• 3 years ago

a.k.a. Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...

readthenotes1• 3 years ago

Iirc in systemantics, it was phrased as "the goal of a system is to perpetuate and extend itself, not to achieve whatever it was created for"

astrange8• 3 years ago

Pournelle was just another Republican and this is just another political slogan, not an "iron law".

He was also an engineer, which makes it even worse, because it means he has old engineer brain where you decide you know everything about everyone else's fields.

ip263• 3 years ago

Pitched competition between well-matched opponents is the only sure-fire antidote. It either keeps the players perpetually lean, or picks off the ones that ossify. You are simply left no choice other than to play seriously or lose.

Tricky to arrange in education, to be sure, because results are difficult to measure objectively.

s1artibartfast9• 3 years ago

I think a lot of the organizational dysfunction in education and more broadly comes down to a poor understanding of rule utilitarianism.

In short, rule utilitarianism is an idea that a standard procedure you can't be better than a complex system that attempts to maximize each individual choice.

The classic example that Economist Mike Munger likes to talk about is stop signs. You could replace stop signs with a complex debate and decision tree to try to decide which car at an intersection has greater need and gets priority. However, this complex process may result in longer wait times for all cars, including those that might have the most urgent need to go through the intersection.

This manifests in education through a million rules which try to optimize performance for very specific and conflicting purposes. As a result, you get a complex system weighed down by its inefficiency that doesn't meet any of its goals.

tyoma• 3 years ago

I think the core issue is that we expect institutions like schools to do multiple, often conflicting tasks. In the US, schools are expected to:

* Provide instruction to the median student. * Provide support services to those with learning or other disabilities. * Empower gifted students to learn to their potential. * Serve as an amateur sports league. * Distribute food to the hungry via the school lunch program * Serve as a point of preventative medical care (e.g. vision and dental screenings) * Screen children for abuse and neglect * Be a place children can be left while parents are at work

Some of these goals will be prioritized over others. The stated goal (education) is not always the goal taxpayers are most supportive of, via revealed preferences on the ballot when it comes to local school funding decisions.

kaitai2• 3 years ago

Yes, agree, and this dovetails with a sibling comment by a long-time teacher. I have a child in the US and have family close in age and demographics in non-US countries. The pressure of school-as-childcare is unique to me in the US because of the amount of paid time off I get, which is substantially less than my peers in Europe. In addition, the financial pressures of childcare and education in the US are quite different than Europe. I certainly earn more money in the US than I would in Europe in the same job, but the logistics of arranging childcare and the pressure of teaching my child both math and English outside of school, despite 7+ hours of school a day, are not insubstantial. As has come up elsewhere in these discussions (on HN and in the article), 15 minutes a day of worksheets has done wonders. While I appreciate what Kid has learned in school, and very much appreciate that Kid's classmates get a nutritional baseline no matter what, it is striking that I must provide this additional instruction and practice. It's this very out-of-school intervention that leads to the inequality of outcomes I so clearly see at the school my child is departing -- one in which the kids with college prof parents score top in the state and kids whose parents are English-language learners or work several (non-adjunct-instructor) jobs score in the 30th percentile. (The kids of all the PhDs, whether well-compensated or not, do fine academically.)

Dumbing down the standards doesn't help anyone. I actually like the idea of a data science class, seems like a great motivation/way to teach algebra, but the way it's being operationally proposed in the CMF does not help. And back to my observation about the worksheets above, “This pathway leaves students unprepared for quantitative four-year college degrees via a newly proposed pathway for teaching mathematics that lacks essential content." “Instead of reducing the gap, the CMF proposal will worsen disparities as students from affluent families will access private instruction and tutors while under-resourced students will be left behind.” -- Dr. Jelani Nelson, absolutely correct.

For interesting discussion of the shoddy research underlying many of the citations in the CMF, see Mike Lawler's Twitter threads (username mikeandallie).

rainsford• 3 years ago

I tend to agree and I think public schools, at least in the US, have the same basic challenge as most government services. The consumer/parent/voter has direct control over the inputs to the system (funding, policy, etc) as well as expectations on the output (the goals you mentioned), but doesn't actually behave as if they're at least partially responsible for those outputs. I actually think taxpayers are generally supportive of education as a goal, but they think that's achieved by shouting at the school district instead of voting as if education was their priority.

Government bureaucracy absolutely produces less than optimal incentives and priorities, but the responsibility voters have in creating those incentives seems underappreciated, especially when it comes to public schools.

bsder• 3 years ago

It felt overtly clear to me, as a student, that schools failed to effectively foster learning and growth.

Schools reflect the values that parents impress upon them.

The vast majority of parents want free daycare and a "Magic Paper(tm)" that gets their child into a college higher than what their child is actually qualified for. Nothing else.

So, you can complain about education not supporting "learning and growth". And you can complain about the bureaucracy. However, parents have made their wishes very loud and clear over the last several decades about exactly what they want out of the public education system.

daseiner1• 3 years ago

and those parents reflect a rotten culture.

another_story2• 3 years ago

There's also an increased distance between those doing the actual work and those making decisions about how it should be done. Bureaucratic depth keeps any real change from taking place, instead leaving those on the ground level to try and work within a set growing rules. Any attempt to affect change has to be filtered through so many levels and takes so long.

As a longtime teacher, I don't think there are any solutions that can effectively reform existing educational institutions. I also don't think there are any solutions which can affect change which won't leave some group(s) disadvantaged.

One thing I'd like to see is a return to schools and districts which are allowed to operate with more autonomy and with budgets not tied to a local tax base, or federal money tied to test scores. I'd also like to see ways teachers and administrators can effectively remove repeat offenders from classes. Teachers are unable to create effective learning environments when they have no way maintain order, which seems to be the case in many schools. Let poor parenting blowback on the parents and maybe you'll get parents to take some responsibility.

All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to. Teach in Asia, Africa and even Europe and you'll see a palpable difference in the way people view education. As a teacher you're able to improve your craft as opposed to surviving day to day.

WalterBright30• 3 years ago

The one solution that will work (and is vehemently resisted) is to pay teachers a base salary plus a bonus for each student that meets grade level expectations at the end of the year.

ecshafer4• 3 years ago

My solution to the education attitude issue in the us, which is very real: pay the families that perform best in school districts. Take the top grades on each years final tests and give the family money. The entire society will change overnight, as people will suddenly be asking kids why they aren’t studying.

wrp2• 3 years ago

The culture in America doesn't respect...educators in the way it used to.

Things may have gone downhill since the 1950s, but it was never very good. Think of the scorn directed at the teaching profession in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and the traditional proverb, "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." I don't know when it began, but the general disrespect for educators is centuries old in Anglo culture.

nebula8804• 3 years ago

All that said, I don't know if it'll change much. The culture in America doesn't respect the value of education, nor educators in the way it used to.

Its crazy to see these stats in the link along with your comment... but at the same time see that the US leading the way(or is at least in the top tier) in technology, business, innovation, etc.

How is the country continuing to produce so much output when its mechanism for generating that output(its people) is in such dire straights? Is this a delay thing? Are we about to have a massive drop off in innovation in 10 years when these kids are the ones in their prime producing years? If that happens what the heck is the leadership/business class going to do? Their power comes from the fact that the country is producing so much.

shreyshnaccount• 3 years ago

And when you suggest that maybe the distance between those making the decision and those on the ground shouldnt be too large, and maybe those on the ground are allowed to take decisions on their own, youd be branded a commie :/

grantsch• 3 years ago

There is no incentive whatsoever without profit motive to help others repeatedly in an efficient way

Large organizations just further exacerbate this

mst_moonshine• 3 years ago

I grew up in China and came to the same conclusion as yours! I never expect such a similarity. I've always thought that education in the US must be much better.

After graduating from college, I realized that the problem I was facing was a systematic one of the whole society, rather than one limited to particular teachers, middle schools, or even the entire education system.

Many people say Chinese maths education is better than the US but I can hardly agree. But based on what I have seen, there are problems on both sides. Chinese education is focusing too much on memorizing existing pieces of knowledge, but too less on teaching the young how to create new ones. The knowledge which our ancestors had struggled for thousands of years to find was taught to us in a spendthrift manner. Aside from lacking training on how to find/create new knowledge, Chinese education does not encourage students to learn advanced topics since it could have negative effects on the students' grades. But there is nothing you can do to change it, because too many things are correlated: fair distribution of teaching resources, less demand for highly educated people in the job market, and the overall not-so-innovation-appealing social vibe. I cannot foresee any possibility of a true, self-driven, systematic reform.

Education in the US, especially math education, on the other hand, is somehow too frivolous. I have no learning experience in any US middle school, so my opinions can be biased. But it seems that US education is more like elite education. The average/universal maths education level should be a little higher in such a highly modernized society.

These different (or even opposite) problems surprisingly show some similarity. Shall I say the problems actually reflect some real problems in the two societies?

syntheweave• 3 years ago

I had the experience of going to US schools among competitive immigrants from Taiwan and HK(in the late 90's, i.e. they left while it was still under the British), and a little bit of mainland China as well.

Reflecting on it, it produced an odd dichotomy in classroom expectations where nobody was really on the same page: I'm fourth-generation American to a mixed European background - my mom insisted on me attempting advanced math, but in a distinctly Eastern European sense, with emphasis on learning theory, which wasn't anything like what I was confronted with at school, which was primarily computational drills that I didn't know how to prepare for and which my parents tried to pretend I could just power through, as my older brother did(he had more of a direct interest, and later confessed that he probably got through it all just with short-term memory, because he was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and started medicating, and thought I should too). My classmates, meanwhile, had clearly normalized strict study habits but could not usefully communicate what they were to me, or maybe did not want to give up their secrets. And the teachers were just pleased that the class behaved so well and could withstand being assigned piles of homework, but they didn't have particularly advanced backgrounds themselves and often couldn't hold their own when challenged by the best students in the city.

And then I went off to college and the student body was now mostly white. I realized that this was a completely different vibe and I didn't understand that, either.

I think the places in which the US system manages to work are because sometimes the collision of varied cultures against the institutions produces useful sparks. The institution itself tracks political winds, which vary at the state and local level. Struggling schools have the usual issues of domestic insecurity spilling into the classroom, and being in the public school system, occasionally I would cross paths with those students instead of the "gifted and talented" track that I was on. But "good schools" tend to be "home owners association" schools, whipped into doing whatever the parents ask for, which usually amounts to fairy tale fantasies. When my mom started pressuring the faculty for me to stay in the advanced math track despite my not fitting there, it was, I now see, in this latter mode. Eventually, not getting the desired result, she insisted that I argue my own case, which of course I was terrible at, and left me confused, ashamed and other feelings which took years to work through. I just wanted to withdraw from everything at that point, but I was being hurried along. That is the one quality I would say tends to always be the case throughout, at least in the large schools I went to - nobody has time for anything, because everyone has a deadline to meet. It's mostly an illusion and busywork, but it nevertheless sucks out societal energy.

The elite students, some of whom I ran into in college, tend to have a path carefully paved for them through subtle signalling and tracking - opportunities and experiences that are just not the norm for anyone less wealthy. They aren't getting well-rounded educations either, rather, they are normalized to self-identify as strivers, which when combined with some early connections, is enough for most of the cohort to advance. I had a housemate who was an heir to an major beer company executive. He was an alcoholic and his dad was, too, and he bemoaned the idea that his summer job was being the boss to people ten decades older than him. His goal in getting a CS degree was to prove that he could do something for himself, essentially.

In the end, looking at it, the way the US system is set up is to not know you are in a rat race until it's too late and you're tracked at the bottom for reasons beyond your control.

electriclove4• 3 years ago

These institutions cannot be reformed in a reasonable amount of time. The alternative has to come from elsewhere. People need a viable alternative so they can 'exit' similar to how Uber changed the taxi industry.

huevosabio• 3 years ago

Indeed. And this is really the alignment problem of our time.

solatic2• 3 years ago

once an organization surpasses a certain size

This is precisely why the solution is to keep size small and allow consumers (in the education market, these are parents) to have a choice between many small providers who are forced to compete with each other. Governments should (with notable exceptions) constantly be pressuring large organizations to break apart into smaller ones.

There are some cases where this isn't feasible, particularly in natural monopolies and in the government itself. Here, I point to Pahlka's excellent "Culture Eats Policy", https://www.niskanencenter.org/culture-eats-policy/ for which no summary can do her piece justice.

diffeomorphism• 3 years ago

Multiple problems with this. The most obvious one is cost: schools don't have large classes because they want to but because of budgets. The second one is that "consumer" sounds like an insult in this case and might very well be: experience in other countries shows you that parents tend to optimize for grades , test scores and "connections"; so you get grade inflation, "teaching to the test", bribery and networks and over all worse quality (just think of prejudices you have heard about some private schools).

tromp• 3 years ago

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”

-- attributed to Oscar Wilde

oatmeal1• 3 years ago

Unless we find a way to counteract this

Charter schools. Competition. Of course education sucks when there's no competition.

hnthrowaway0315• 3 years ago

Well, "Yes Prime Minister" already figured it out. The whole education system is more for the welfare of bureaucracies and teachers/unions instead of students'. And that was some 40 years ago.

superchroma2• 3 years ago

Teachers make very little money. Society has deemed them worth almost nothing despite the fact that they're pivotal in shaping minds; the future of america, and that they do very hard, frustrating work taking care of our spawn in a country where parents treat school like daycare instead of a place to learn.

They wouldn't need a union to collectively bargain if they were taken care of properly. On the flipside, I acknowledge that it is unfortunate that teaching seems to be a drip pan to collect people who do not succeed in primary careers, and that should probably stop also.

ochoseis• 3 years ago

Teachers appear to earn an average of $79k in California[0], and are eligible for a pension[1] that probably boosts their earnings to the equivalent of a six-figure job. Also, they get summers and holidays off. Not silicon valley engineer money, but not bad.

[0] https://www.niche.com/blog/teacher-salaries-in-america/ [1]: https://www.calstrs.com/retirement-benefits

ip263• 3 years ago

The two are probably the opposite sides of the same coin. If it was a prestigious and well paid profession, a career flame-out would not be able to land a job teaching.

tgv4• 3 years ago

A bureaucracy tries to keep itself alive. That's part of its goal. But "Yes, Prime Minister" is a British series, so unions are small, and not well off; they've got some political influence, and form a jumping board for future politicians, but that too is the nature of "middle field", as it's known in Dutch: the sector between citizens and government. Teachers' welfare also can't be the point, since more and more people avoid becoming teacher altogether. It's too much work for a pretty modest income.

Education involves a lot of money. It's the interference of individuals that want some of that that deteriorates it.

timthorn• 3 years ago

The teaching unions have pretty broad coverage, even more so when Yes PM was written.

keithnz• 3 years ago

To people where math (to some higher level) is kind of okish, this seems bad. But in my experience, most people coming out of school ( and I'm 50+ so going back decades now) don't really have a useful working knowledge of mathematical ideas. For many they just end up hating it, instantly forgetting everything they learned through pain when they leave school, and never want anything to do with math again. I'm all for people trying new ideas to teach math, also changing the way we assess it. As long as there is a path that preserves "academic math"

outlace3• 3 years ago

I think we significantly overestimate how much school actually matters compared to family milieus. My wife and I highly value education, so regardless of when the school says children should learn algebra, I am already tutoring my 6 year old in basic algebra. If school did nothing other than be a daycare for my kids so we could work, they'd probably still be better educated than most kids going through public school because my wife and I will make sure of that because we teach our kids a lot on our own (and we're not hiring tutors or after school programs). If schools were more rigorous then it would save us time from having to do a lot of the educating ourselves, but it won't change family values.

injb• 3 years ago

This. I strongly suspect that the biggest problem in school for children from good families isn't the schooling but rather the presence of children from bad families.

My sister is a primary teacher and the things I've heard make it clear that the system tries to make up for bad parenting but it's and uphill struggle.

ramraj07• 3 years ago

You are correct that in our world currently and maybe even in the past, the kids never truly learned math in school. I studied in the top university in my Indian province with 50 million people, and most of my undergrad colleagues truly didn’t understand what differentiation and integration actually meant.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The kids are supposed to learn things in school, we just need to pull our heads out of our assess and acknowledge that almost all current learning systems suck and try to reset from the ground up.

oefrha2• 3 years ago

School doesn’t matter when school is made useless. Almost a tautology.

fn-mote2• 3 years ago

This is a recipe for an ignorant underclass from which one can never escape. What is a bright kid supposed to do when their parents have a third grade education? Functioning public school is supposed to solve that problem.

peterfirefly4• 3 years ago

Public libraries were invented a long, long time ago. These days, the internet is even better than the public libraries used to be.

bleuchase• 3 years ago

What is a bright kid supposed to do when their parents have a third grade education?

What do they do in the current system? Get stuck in a class that can’t move faster than the average student?

tlogan2• 3 years ago

Yes. However, public schools should provide opportunities for children to break free from this destructive cycle.

And it is not about “family” values. What the single grandma can do? Or single mom having drug issues can do? And these two examples are 100% real world examples.

outlace3• 3 years ago

But that’s sort of the point I’m making- schools can’t fix drug-addicted parents and that’s probably going to make much more of a difference in a child’s educational attainment than how good their teacher is at teaching math. Unless schools are going to do more than just teach academic subjects. They will basically have to function as reliable, disciplining parents.

theGnuMe2• 3 years ago

How do you teach your 6 year old algebra?

outlace3• 3 years ago

I'll give her simple problems like "x + 5 = 0, what must `x` be to make this true?" (First had to teach her the number line and negative numbers) or "2*y = 6, what is y?" (Taught her multiplication as a copy-then-add operation, ie she knows that 2*3 means to make 3 copies of 2 and then add them all together. She hasn’t yet learned the times table)

huitzitziltzin• 3 years ago

The strangest thing to me is that American education professors wield power in setting educational standards, when their own field is completely allergic to any serious empirical work on what works. I guess to a state legislator a “professor of mathematics education” sounds like the kind of person who should know about these things?

California math standards resemble New York reading standards in their lack of engagement with studies of what works. There are too many examples like this. We would all be better off if education professors stayed completely out of the business of setting state standards.

blindriver2• 3 years ago

The actions that the California state education system towards Blacks and Brown kids are exactly what the most insidious racist person would do. If I hated Black and Brown kids, I would lower the education standards so low that these kids would graduate high school being unable to compete at the city, state or country level. And this is EXACTLY what is happening. Half of the Black kids in SF are graduating high school and can barely read.

Now with the gutting with math, Black and Brown kids will be even further behind on math than the rest of the demographics. It's horrifying.

Anyone who has money will avoid all this by either sending their kids to private school, which is what we did, or getting enrichment classes after school. Both of those options are unavailable to lower income kids, so the gap between the haves and the have nots will only increase at an exponential rate.

There is nothing more racist than the of lowered expectations in the guise of ruinous empathy for "the poor victims of white supremacy". You help undereducated kids by raising expectations, and pumping money into the system so that the student teacher ratio plummets in the poorest areas that need the most help. Instead SFUSD was spending millions to change the names of school instead of trying to get those kids to learn how to read.

no_butterscotch• 3 years ago

Nothing like the subtle bigotry of lower expectations - the best way to keep "those people" in the underclass is to lower the standards.

I'm hoping the reversal of affirmative action will light a fire under this issue.

0xy2• 3 years ago

People with money homeschool, with much better results. There's even small homeschooling groups that pool resources to hire the best tutors money can buy.

Homeschooling is exploding exponentially, doubling from 2012 to 2023 and a large portion of the parents who pulled kids from schools during COVID simply aren't going back.

Understandable, because the quality of education is extremely poor. Unqualified parents homeschooling literally produce better outcomes.

Not to mention the violence in public schools (which is escalating), and the abuse from teachers that the major US teaching unions ritually cover up (the teacher's unions vehemently defend predator teachers).

Teachers unions are in the business of protecting predators, financially and with predator-friendly policy like union-decided arbitration venues. [1]

[1] https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/campbell-brown-teachers-un...

astrange8• 3 years ago

Homeschooling is exploding exponentially, doubling from 2012 to 2023

Two data points can't show something is exponential!

Also, it can't possibly be exponential because the US population is not growing exponentially.

tlogan2• 3 years ago

I have both of my kids enrolled in SFUSD and what you describe is exactly what's happening. Majority of “affluent” parents and immigrants are enrolling their children in Sylvan, Kumon, hiring Russian instructors, and so forth. Even school counselors will suggest this, as they also enroll their own children in such programs and subtly encourage you to do the same.

However, if a child belongs to a disadvantaged group, then they're out of luck. There's virtually no assistance available for them. While the district does offer free after-school and extra classes through SF State, these require a significant amount of paperwork which, as you probably know, necessitates full involvement from both parents. Essentially, the system is set up so that disadvantaged children don't receive the help they need.

It's a truly racist system. Yet, they can freely post on Twitter, touting how great and progressive they are.

wisty• 3 years ago

I think a major problem is that most education "experts" (the type policy makers listen to, not practicing teachers) are upper-middle-class kids who had their parents teach them the basics of phonics and times tables. Who else would get a PhD in education?

They went to school, and found learning these things a massive waste of time, because their parents had already set them up to succeed, but they don't realise it was their parents doing all the work and it's not a waste of time or just "common sense" to the kids who didn't have the same home environment.

romusha• 3 years ago

If they underpay the teachers, then they don't need it. And people will be better off avoiding teaching as a career

jncfhnb4• 3 years ago

For my school, kids taking algebra 1 in 9th grade were the remedial students. To force everyone into this track and pace… ugh.

meroes• 3 years ago

I can confidently say only 6 out of 16 years of math education (elementary through undergrad math degree) were "good". Contrarily for example, most science classes were good in my experience.

Math is down there with the worst average teachers. I learned more from YouTube than the textbook+teacher for some classes (Hello Professor Leonard anyone?). Without some YouTube professors I probably would have failed several classes.

My gripes: Most teachers suck, no one teaches you how to actually study math along the way, the word problems/applications need to stop being almost always about physics ffs, too many classes have inadequate or poor technology, the big picture concepts/threads are lost by most math teachers, and some textbooks are AWFUL, the eTextbook push has made some even worse (too many examples of why to list), and finally there needs to be sometime in those 16 years where foundations and philosophical issues are broached at least passingly.

The good math classes are amazing, and that's what kept me interested. But I just had to vent about the wasted potential. I'm not giving a nuanced opinion, I'm pointing out some glaring issues. Also if you get a teacher who says they regularly attend some national conference for math educators to structure their class, transfer out.

teddyh• 3 years ago

See also: A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart (2002): <https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....>

andelink2• 3 years ago

Thank you for sharing this. I had not read it before and it beautifully put to words the feelings I developed while getting my math degree.

MichaelNolan• 3 years ago

Somehow I stumble upon that paper once every few years, and I enjoy reading it every time.

electriclove4• 3 years ago

Great article! Though the author despises phrases like Woke Math, his description of the failings of the California Math Framework is exactly what critics are referring to when using phrases like Woke Math.

oceanghost2• 3 years ago

I am just confronting this now. My daughter is 6, and I'm trying to teach her math and reading. She's excelling at reading. The thing about math is, I have to teach her math the way the standards specify. The problem is…

The common core math is just strange. I find it confusing, and I did a full tour at an engineering college.

Math is a “procedure”. That's why programs like MatLab/MathCad can solve equations-- they just have a set of rules that solve problems. Learning math is the process of internalizing these rules.

The common core stuff seems to be the opposite of this. I want to build with my daughter a set of skills (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, exponents etc, eventually moving on to trig, linear algebra and calc) she can build on. But common core hopelessly confuses even simple things like adition.

electriclove4• 3 years ago

Please look into Beast Academy (online without books) and work through it with your daughter. Read the comics to her and go through the exercises together as needed.

sfink• 3 years ago

I'll second this.

Beast is the only thing I've come across that feels to me like it's actually teaching math.

oceanghost2• 3 years ago

Thank you, I will look into this.

gnicholas2• 3 years ago

Khan Academy worked well for our kid, who started at that age. She worked through 1-2 grades per year and is now in their Algebra series. The main complaint I have is that there is no concept of 'practice' or 'drilling'. You just learn something and go straight to the quiz.

There are two problems with this. The first is that it doesn't get kids used to doing practice, which is critical for learning more advanced skills.

The second is that the quizzes use a lot of multiple choice (particularly in the younger grades, where kids are not assumed to be literate). Getting a handful of multiple choice questions correct is not a good indicator of having mastered a topic. Once I realized this, I told my kid she had to get all of the questions correct on the quiz 3 times in a row in order to move on.

Balgair2• 3 years ago

Like a lot of education, California's is so tied up in so many ways that it takes books to understand.

The first issue that springs to mind is the funding. Most funds in California do not stay local, they go to Sacramento and are then distributed out. If you're thinking that is a system ripe for abuse, then you are correct. The formulas and methods for determining funding aren't easy to grok. But then you add in all the fraud from schools themselves and you get a real mess.

Further, Prop 13's starvation of property taxes has also contributed to the lack of public school funding in California. It's a bit of a winding tale there, but suffice to say, less taxes means less good schools. Then again, Prop 13 is, just, hoo boy. What a total long standing mess.

So, does California need better education. Oh heck yes. But fixing that requires dealing with things like Prop 13 and other huge political monsters barely hidden under the rug. Try finding any politician with the bravery, let alone stamina, to fix those titanic underlying issues (pun intended).

rahimnathwani2• 3 years ago

Funding is not the problem, at least not everywhere. My local school district (San Francisco) has:

- an annual operating budget of $1.2bn/year.

- ~50k K-12 students.

That's $24k per student per year.

Let's assume a teacher costs $150k/year and you want a low student:teacher ratio of 20:1.

Of the $24k, $7.5k is needed to pay 1/20th of the cost of the teacher.

You still have two thirds of the money left. Is that not enough to pay for management and facilities?

Balgair2• 3 years ago

The median salary for a teacher in SF seems to be ~$70k +/- $9k [0], so about half you guess. Which, I mean, how the heck are they living anywhere near SF on that salary? Jeeze Louise...

A better breakdown of the '21-'22 budget for SFUSD seems to be here: [1]. Numbers in () are a per student number

Federal Revenue: $48,915,000 ($926)

Local Revenue: $667,062,000 ($12,631)

State Revenue: $455,213,000 ($8,620)

Instructional Expenditures: $503,371,000 ($9,532)

Student and Staff Support: $193,984,000 ($3,673)

Administration: $104,612,000 ($1,981)

Operations, Food Service, other: $103,178,000 ($1,954)

Construction: $190,399,000 ($3,605)

Student/Teacher Ratio: 19.32

Total $ per student seems to be ~$22k, the ratio is just under 20:1, and construction is just under 20%, so your guesses were pretty good!

The site has more info, but one thing to notice is that the expenditures add up to more than the revenues. As in, SFUSD is in debt at ~$6 per student.

Play with the numbers yourself (please also find another source of data). In the end, it seems SFUSD is not doing all that well if it's only paying teachers ~$70k, is still running a deficit, and has revenues of ~$1.1B per year. Something seems strange about all those numbers.

[0] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-scho...

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?I...

yes_really• 3 years ago

California: one of the richest regions on Earth, with the highest taxes in the US, and math education worse than third-world countries.

thejackgoode• 3 years ago

Since we are talking about education, there is no such thing as "third world", for 32 years at least.

ern• 3 years ago

U.S. high school math scores lag significantly behind other countries, even though scores in reading and science are above average

How much of this math gap is because other countries focus heavily on test prep and exam performance?

t8sr3• 3 years ago

Optimizing for test scores is an American phenomenon. AFAIK schools in most of the rest of the developed world are not worrying about these metrics. (They do worry about how many pupils go on to graduate college, for example.)

(Although of course nobody on here likely knows anything about more than a handful of countries’ systems at most.)

strix_varius4• 3 years ago

This is blatantly wrong.

https://www.npr.org/2010/12/29/132416889/chinese-top-in-test...

Loocid• 3 years ago

Optimizing for test scores is an American phenomenon.

Completely false. Look at the culture around standardised testing in places like Japan and South Korea. I'm Australian and optimizing for test scores is absolutely a thing here too, though I admit probably less so than the US.

badrabbit2• 3 years ago

I think standardized tests are ideal. Make them very hard and don't be afraid to fail most of your students and have them repeat grades. Testing should not account for anything about a student other than physical disability needs.

The effects of these measures are seen decades after enactment. From what I have observed, the politicization of education and having metrics other than academic tests has gotten so bad, it should be discussed as a matter of national security. Relying on immigrants to fill in the gap and hoping they'll choose to remain in the US(despite societal hostility growing) is not a sustainable strategy.

This is the one area China, India and Russia can run circles around the US easily.

viraptor2• 3 years ago

other than physical disability needs.

And mental, unless you wanted to likely fail many people with various kinds of dyslexia and many other issues.

If your actually care only about the test results, there's lots of other adjustments you should be very interested in to enable everyone to have a shot.

badrabbit2• 3 years ago

Yeah, mental too, so long as it impedes learning.

If your actually care only about the test results, there's lots of other adjustments you should be very interested in to enable everyone to have a shot.

Depends. If a child has terrible parents for example, testing shouldn't accomodate for that. Same thing if family income and other issues are a factor. I think you are talking about learning accomodation and that's probably fine but tests should measure ability.

I inclided physical disability only because I couldn't think of how mental disability could be accomodated for in a test. But dyslexia is a good one, carefully crafting questions and answers for dyslexic kids makes sense.

xwdv• 3 years ago

I know of no better way to promote inequity than to gatekeep knowledge so that only those with abundant resources can access it.

casey2• 3 years ago

I don't believe that "education resources" are lacking at all, if a student has access to the internet they have instant access to anything they would learn k-16. In terms of exercise, everybody has their own personal/public gym, with all the most advanced equipment (possibly interspersed with suboptimal equipment but an advanced personal gym nonetheless) that they do not use, because they either aren't athletes or don't care about exercise for health/spiritual fulfillment. Any work on making the gym better is wasted it isn't being used.

How can we solve this problem? Advertisement.

Perhaps instead of giving talks at conferences to people who couldn't care less about what you are saying and even if they did care they are "too busy" to engage with the ideas; you give talks to elementary schoolers instead. Elementary school, classrooms or auditoriums, or a monthly lecture series over the course of a year.

There aren't many other effective ways to show students that real people actually care about STEM, this one has the bonus of making use of the education of people who went from say EE to IT support, teachers cannot reasonably be expected to explain to children how electricity works better than that guy who lives a block down from you who has a stack of breadboards up to the ceiling, and just showing a video lacks the spontaneity needed to keep children engaged as you change focus.

What exactly is stopping you from repeating that talk you gave at strangeloop, rustconf, usenix, fosdem or gophercon to that school within walking distance? At the very least can you walk into the principal's office, look them dead in the eye; give them a firm handshake and tell them that you want to get involved with the kids' education.

How many STEM degrees holders are in California? A hundred thousand? How many elementary schools? <6,000. Even including middle and highschools the total is <10,000. The more people who participate the more it will show children that STEM is a real part of their life right now.

If you are a Californian, tell me how many STEM related talks, given by a community speaker, did you attend during your k-12 schooling? Now tell me how many times your teacher put on some random movie.

For me the answers are 0 and 100+

John23832• 3 years ago

The California educational public system is made to hamstring those that need it in order to prop up those that don’t.

theGnuMe2• 3 years ago

The standard path is optimized for college admissions discrimination. It is prep for the SAT and calculus. What is not taught is effective problem solving. Instead we are basically teaching rote pattern matching. The proof of this claim is that chat gpt aces the SAT in math but fails on any advanced test like the IIT exams. Chat gpt even fails advanced AP English and literature exams. A place a priori you’d expect an LLM to do well.

Yes we should learn the chain rule and derivatives/slope but arguably developing statistical, mathematical and even computational reasoning/thinking is a better foundation.

slowmovintarget3• 3 years ago

Math should be more inclusive. Math should be more engaging. I think one of the biggest mistakes both Dr. Boaler’s supporters and detractors have made in this debate is to try to slot what should be a practical, fact based argument about optimal math education into an ideological struggle invoking silly phrases like Woke Math. Dr. Boaler and her fans did not make math education worse by being too left wing in their math—whatever that even means—but by sloppy with their science and lazy with their facts. You don’t make math education better by advocating for changes based on lies, and unfortunately, that is exactly what happened here.

The assertion is that this was not leftist politics at work. Why else would Dr. Boaler advocate for what the author asserts are lies, then? The author also admits that the aim is equal outcomes and gives data showing the approach is actively worse, even on that measure. How is this not a problem of Progressivism over Liberalism?

In response to this, science and math professors across the state have been raising alarms. In response, Dr. Boaler turned to a tactic she often relies on—trying to wrap her ideas in the context of a broader culture war, painting critics as stodgy conservatives fighting her efforts to make math more equitable and diverse. She described her critics as those resisting change. The notion that teaching this version of data science rather than Algebra II is somehow more equitable permeates the CMF in often bizarre ways.
The CMF says data science is more equitable than other STEM fields because “data scientists work together to address uncertainty in data while avoiding bias.”

So the aim is to train people to "clean data," leading to more equity! That is, train people to use the tools to eliminate data from datasets that meets someone else's definition of bias. Why "someone else's?" Because if the people wielding the tools don't have an understanding of the underlying math (something the article opines about) they can't know whether a dataset is biased or not without someone else telling them it is and how. When someone else tells them that any data indicating X < 0.9 is biased, they can then blindly eliminate all values of X less than 0.9. Yay! "Unbiased" data! Such a manipulation would have to be done on faith rather than on understanding.

How is this not a problem of politics getting in the way of education?

The only possible alternative is that it is the adjacent hustle of big business aligned with a particular political mindset. But that only makes it mildly removed from, not entirely divorced from, Progressive policy advocacy.

perryizgr8• 3 years ago

The problem is thinking that 5 or 10 or 20 people can decide what is good for millions of kids. Let parents work with teachers and schools to figure out what works for their kids.

The government should shut down all public funded schools. If some people need financial aid to ensure education, provide that aid directly in the form of money or school vouchers.

Schools will spring up with varied teaching philosophies and approaches. Parents can evaluate the available options and enroll their kids wherever they like.

Eventually the best approaches will win out, and even specialisations might emerge. Maybe everyone actually doesn't need to learn arithmetic. But others do. So they would choose the appropriate school and courses.

JumpCrisscross• 3 years ago

Wow, this Boaler character is a piece of work [1][2].

[1] https://stanfordreview.org/review-investigation-jo-boaler-is...

[2] https://stanfordreview.org/boaler-professor/

boringuser2• 3 years ago

Education interventions are historically some of the least effective endeavors of any public works project.

Countless attempts to spend beacoup bucks to bridge racial gaps in educational attainment and IQ have been made and none have ever worked.

Given the bet available evidence, not much education is necessary to bring out the potential of a population in terms of attainment and IQ scoring.

yqinyn• 3 years ago

I went to high school in China, and the Math problems in the US from the same level are literal jokes to us. At the end of the semester, my teacher doesn't have anything else planned for the last class, so just for fun he would find these problems and share with the class :"Now let's look at what American students in your age are dealing with". I remember all of the problems are so dumb that the whole class would had a good laugh reading through them.

At that time I thought the whole Math education in the US is a joke, until I came here for graduate school and realized how brutally challenging the Math is in higher educations.

My 2 cents is that the majority demographics in the US don't give a damn about Math, or any kind of formal education. Most people, even the uneducated, are living a comfortable enough life, so there is no such thing for the next generation to dream of "changing their lives" by pursuing better education. As a result, these type of education are only reserved by the elite. While in a lot of developing countries, education is the only way for a normal people to not end up being extremely poor for the rest of his/her lives.

somedude895• 3 years ago

"Now let's look at what American students in your age are dealing with"

That's some top grade propaganda to indoctrinate children there, just like with the authorities suppressing news about the knife attacks on Chinese kindergartens and instead reporting extensively on school shootings in the US to show how safe China is compared to the US. Gotta love the CCP

abracadabra0000• 3 years ago

so there is no such thing for the next generation to dream of "changing their lives" by pursuing better education.

Is there really a point in grinding to learn calc 4 if you aren’t going to use it? Is the typical Chinese citizen in the workforce going to even use calc to begin with?

cashsterling• 3 years ago

Oh wow... this article resonates with me and is bringing up some stuff for me as a parent.

My son was in the 8th grade the first year or two that CA rolled out this replace Algebra 2 with Data Science. The Piedmont school district selected this ridiculous book for the course that contained only problems, no lessons. I could go into a deep diatribe about this book, and the course design, but it did things like 'use exponents and exponent notation without introducing what exponents are and how they work... un-flipping believable.

I scheduled a parent-teacher meeting to discuss my concerns about the course design and book... and was assured by the assistant principal that the course was designed by experts and the book was carefully selected and was written by professors with expertise in math education. I. got. nowhere.

Here are vents/beefs with our education system today, as it pertains to math & science:

- What the heck happened to using a nice print book? It is understood that people learn better from reading and working with print books. Even in the 'every kid has a phone', screens everywhere, age... I have found this to be true for my kids and other parents have found the same. kids do better at math/science/history working out of a good physical book. Somehow, we can afford iPad's for every kid but we can't afford books?

- the 8th grade math book above was 80 USD for a hard copy, which I bought so I could tutor my son at home... absolutely deplorable. Not only was the book's content garbage... but the paper and print quality was also garbage. Somehow, I can buy a beautiful hardback textbook on an esoteric math topic for as little 50 USD... meanwhile, a 8th grade textbook is reaming the state coffers. We have so much economic capture and profiteering in K-12 education and it is disgusting... all K-12 content should be creative commons licensed and book cost should cover printing costs and meager profit and that's it (think www.openintro.org).

- We have some very special idiots in our public education system and they are "trying out education theories" on our kids, and we are letting them. There was nothing wrong with the math education 20 years ago, or even 40 years ago. Math is hard, that is okay... not everyone has to be a math genius. Learning math well takes time, being kind & compassionate to ourselves / our kids, and appreciating the grind a little bit. Even if there was something wrong with our classical math education, we could look at other countries who are kicking our ass in math education and see what they're doing... hints: teachers are treated/paid better, they use print textbooks with lots of carefully constructed lessons (graphics) and worked examples, gradual introduction of ideas in class with ample time for discussion, lots of spaced repetition, and lots of exercises starting with "very easy", to build confidence and enjoyment of progress/understanding, and moving gradually to more challenging.

This 8th grade books I refer to above was doing absolutely crazy stuff like throwing a couple problems out on average and standard deviation (again, with no lessons in book... just problems) and then, two problems later, asking them interpret box plots (again, without a lesson on box plots)... insanity. Kids in the class were so lost and disheartened; they all felt stupid. I had to keep telling my son, "you're not stupid... this book is completely ridiculous. The people who wrote this book, and the people who selected this book for your class, are out of touch with reality."

RecycledEle• 3 years ago

I've taught high school and college for more than 2 decades. Please ignore me while I rant.

Before we can fix public education, we need to admit that humans are inherently unequal. Not everyone is at the top of the class in math. It is a teacher's job to bring the kids at the bottom up as high as we can, but some of them will not get it on their first try. That is nature.

Then we need to motivate them. Stop grouping kids into math classes based on what grade they are in. That does not match the workplaces we are preparing them for. Instead, we need to group them by interests. Let me teach a class of kids who truly love cars. I'll bring an old engine in and start teaching them arithmetic, geometry, and algebra.

Let me teach a class of kids who want to be streamers and YouTubers. I'll use DSLRs and Premiere Pro to teach them arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. They will learn the same math as the future mechanics, but they will not use the same examples.

Let me teach a class of kids who love money to do the accounting for the auto shop kids.

The only problem with grouping them by ability is that most (85%) of public school students have the intellectual curiosity of tomatoes. They love only app games and music. They are vegetables. The fix to that is to kick them out and let them try to earn a living until they (the ones that survive) come home and beg for a chance to learn enough to earn a living. Then they will pay attention in class.

We need to incentivize the learning of these public schools students while we kick their inflated egos out from under them. They think they are smart enough to be the CEO of Intel. We need to call them on that. Let's see them earn their lunch money replacing the shocks on cars, creating marketing videos for Fiverr clients, or keeping track of the accounting for the other classes. I'll teach them what they need to know.

Above all, do not let anyone supervise a teacher who is not qualified to teach that subject. Public schools prepare principals to run high schools in 4 steps: First, have them teach kindergarten for a year. Second, be an elementary school principal for a year. Third, be a junior high principal for a year. Fourth, be a high school principal. Imagine if the head of OpenAI started doing tech support for Microsoft Word, then because a supervisor over Word Tech Support, then moved to be the head of developing Microsoft Office (without being able to code) then move to be the head of OpenAI (without being able to explain what a GAN is.) Seriously. I've had public school bosses who saw no reason to ask the kids to log into the PCs in a computer class. They wanted to see me "teach" meaning talk to the kids without them touching the PCs in a computer class. They were stuck in kindergarten.

California needs real math education, not gimmicks

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